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As entertainment critic Roger
Ebert once said, "If you disagree with something I write, tell me so, argue
with me, correct me--but don't tell me to shut up. That's not the American way."

The Hills star Heidi Montag's 24-year-old stepbrother, Eric O'Hara, a veteran of several combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, has lost his life in a bizarre accident at the Colorado hotel where he worked, the Rocky Mountain News reports.

O'Hara died Thursday at the Steamboat Grand Resort Hotel in Steamboat Springs, after he slipped off a sloped roof while attempting to remove snow.

"Having made it through 15 months in Iraq, and then to have this happen," said his uncle, Dave Patston, "it's really tough."

"Everyone loved him," O'Hara's grandmother, Dolores Spurgeon, also told the paper (via TMZ). "I never met a person who did not love him."

She added that O'Hara's colonel in the Army's 82nd Airborne Division in Tikrit, Iraq, called to say, "Eric was the most remarkable young man he'd ever worked with, a born leader."

He felt a call to duty, his grandmother also said, because "He'd been in and out of Twin Towers when he was little. His father was a stockbroker and had offices there."

Their destruction, she said, "just gnawed at him. He decided, 'I need to go to defend my country.' "

Heidi's father, Bill Montag, is married to O'Hara's mother Terri, both of whom survive Eric, as do his father, two sisters, another stepsister (Holly Montag), his grandmother and other relatives.

Although I don't care much for Heidi, this story breaks my heart for her and her family. Her stepbrother sounds like an American hero and for him to die like this, just after returning from Iraq is so unfair. My prayer and thoughts are definitely with this young man's family.

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